


Glasnost

by arboreal_overlords



Series: this is a cold war [2]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Annoy Nureyev in the brig 2kwhenever, Are there legos in space? Sure why not, Buddy will get her found family dammit, Canon-Typical Door Symbolism, Content warning for Nureyev’s radiation sickness, F/F, Gen, If the Aurinko Crime Fam doesn’t do the Avengers pose at least once what is the POINT, Nureyev gets to be a little badass as a treat, Nureyev speedruns a redemption arc, Other, including emetophobia, this ends happily!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25660459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: No matter what Juno said retrospectively, Peter was in no way actually imprisoned in the brig of the Carte Blanche. Even half-dying and with a broken leg, Peter could have broken out of Hoosegow with nothing but a shoestring and the power of suggestion. He remained in the brig of the Carte Blanche as a gesture of repentance, constrained only by ties of love and friendship.“Jail, Nureyev,” Juno said later, rolling his eye at him. “We put you in jail.”But he was getting ahead of himself.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko & Peter Nureyev & Rita & Jet Sikuliaq & Juno Steel & Vespa, Buddy Aurinko/Vespa, Juno Steel & Vespa (Penumbra Podcast), Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Series: this is a cold war [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860574
Comments: 28
Kudos: 142





	Glasnost

**Author's Note:**

> You were all really lovely and kind about asking for a sequel that featured the crime fam bullying Nureyev, so one additional pretentious-cold-war-title later, here you go! I broke it into two pieces because there’s accidentally a LOT of plot, especially in the second part. 
> 
> Also, I didn’t title it ‘Glassnost’ even though in my heart of hearts I wanted to, so you’re welcome. 
> 
> BIG CONTENT WARNING for Nureyev’s radiation sickness (including injections, vomiting, discussions of past doctors). I don’t go into a ton of detail about his symptoms and medical history, but it’s in the background.

No matter what Juno said retrospectively, Peter was in no way actually _imprisoned_ in the brig of the Carte Blanche. Even half-dying and with a broken leg, Peter could have broken out of Hoosegow with nothing but a shoestring and the power of suggestion. He remained in the brig of the Carte Blanche as a gesture of repentance, constrained only by ties of love and friendship.

“Jail, Nureyev,” Juno said later, rolling his eye at him. “We put you in jail.”

But he was getting ahead of himself. 

* * *

Peter first awoke with a pounding headache from the stunner blast in addition to the usual faint nausea and abdominal pain. He stilled, accustomed to masking his symptoms even while half-asleep, but he was alone. He could hear voices ringing faintly down the hall. Rita’s distinctive tone was climbing in pitch and volume into a menacing squawk, so she was mad at someone.

Rita was mad at _him_ , Peter remembered suddenly. They all were, because—

Oh.

The brig of the Carte Blanche was a narrow room with a tiny attached bathroom and a single lumpy cot. The outer wall was covered in a translucent mesh polymer, with holes big enough to stick an arm through, but not much more. It was really more of a medical containment room than a proper brig; Buddy had never been interested in taking prisoners.

Vespa appeared eventually with a medical bag and a furious expression. “Hey, thief,” she said. “Give me your arm.”

Peter sighed and stood shakily, extending his arm through one of the holes in the mesh frame. He was only half-feigning his unsteadiness. “Ah, Vespa,” he said. “I suppose I can only ask that you don’t stray into the more creative violations of the Hippocratic oath.”

“Shut up, Ransom,” she snapped and busied herself rifling through her medical bag before emerging with a syringe.“You’re not the only one who can compartmentalize.”

Vespa had to come closer in order to draw blood from Peter’s arm, ducking her head to find a vein. She was focused enough that he could probably break her neck without alerting the rest of the crew. Vespa was fast and strong, but Peter had at least a foot on her and the advantage of a reinforced barrier to use as leverage. Peter calculated these possibilities automatically, without thought to the ethics or likelihood of the action. Old habits died hard. Vespa looked up and raised an eyebrow at him as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. She was probably relishing any possible excuse to gut him like a fish.

Vespa then proceeded to run through the normal barrage of tests; she shone a light in his eyes, took his temperature, asked gruffly about his appetite, and whether or not he’d started regularly vomiting. Peter had suffered through a year’s worth of medical poking and proddings, the endless parade of doctors treating his body as if it was a piece of meat that wasn’t falling in line. Vespa’s actually one of the better doctors he’d had, which really tells you something about the state of healthcare on the solar planets. She maintained a steady stream of what Nureyev assumed was murderous invective under her breath as she examined him, but that anger never came through in her actions. 

After brusquely punching a few things into her tablet, Vespa injected him with a syringe full of familiar electric-blue liquid. It’s a cocktail of potassium iodide and Prussian blue, the metaphorical equivalent of putting a band-aid over a bullet wound. Buddy and Vespa both take shots of the mix daily; it’s the closest they had to a medical solution to radiation sickness until they reach the Curemother.

“I want to talk to Juno,” Peter said.

Vespa snorted. “Well, I wanted your intestines as a wedding present,” she snapped. “So I guess that neither of us is getting what we wanted tonight.” 

* * *

In his more contemplative moments, of which he now had many, Peter could admit that he chose the alias ‘Peter Ransom’ with more poetry than sense. The name he had used to break into the Guardian Angel system on New Kinsasha all those years ago was still flagged by hundreds of governments and security systems. But what were those concerns, Peter thought bitterly, compared to his own desire to make a _statement_.

Peter Ransom was born to a boring, moderately wealthy family from Io that he still sent impersonal holiday cards to when he remembered. He turned to crime over other professions out of talent and impatience rather than actual need, annoyed with the red tape required for legal business on Io. He was smart and curious like Rex Glass, with none of Glass’ chivalric cheer. If Glass carried his hyper-educated accent with an air of self-mockery, Ransom used it unironically. Ransom was professional and polite, but not warm. He dressed like a brutalist building: dark colors, severe and minimalist lines, spiky jewelry that doubled as weapons. Ransom wasn’t particularly likable: but then again, he wasn’t taking on jobs that required him to be liked.

Then, of course, Peter Ransom got sick. Peter Nureyev also got sick. That’s the tricky thing about aliases— they all shared the same organs. Peter could change his hair, his voice, appear taller or shorter or paler, but an illness was a tracking beacon that he couldn’t cut out of his own body.

When adults in Brahma started falling ill, they initially assumed that it was a virus. Then cases started springing up on other planets; all former Brahmese citizens, all over twenty. First altered appetite and gastrointestinal issues, then vomiting. The cause of death was almost always kidney failure. It took months for the information to filter into the general public; the Brahmese government was hesitant to admit that its prized Guardian Angel system had had the unfortunate side effect of causing a new strain of slow-onset radiation sickness. The more exposure that you had received by living in proximity to the deadly lasers, the quicker the sickness killed you once it finally appeared.

The richest citizens sprung for transplants, but those procedures didn’t always take, especially if you were a wanted criminal whose DNA would light up half the crime databases in the galaxy. If Nureyev allowed himself to be anesthetized for major surgery, he’d wake up in a jail cell, if he woke up at all. Even with all of his failsafes, it took the Bareda Corp an embarrassingly short amount of time to connect the political legacy of Peter Nureyev, alias Peter Ransom, to the 37-year old who was clearing his bank accounts in an attempt to combat Brahmese radiation sickness. They could have handed Peter over to the Brahmese government for a handsome bounty, but decided that a combination of blackmail and medical loans was a better long term investment.

This is all to say that even though Peter could break out of this flimsy brig and the Carte Blanche in seconds, his options afterward are . . . limited. There aren’t many places where the Bareda Corp couldn’t track him down, and without the specialized medication that their loans had provided, Nureyev would maybe have weeks before dying of kidney failure.

While sitting in the brig, Peter first turned his thoughts to alternative possibilities. He wasn’t used to dwelling on a single course of thought for so long, turning it like a puzzle box in his mind. He’d survived for so many years based on his ability to shift focus; to brutally compartmentalize and move to the next challenge. Peter’s mind was like a shark; he had to keep moving, or he’d die. He had tried explaining this to Juno once, since the detective always loved a metaphor. Juno had frowned and said, “What the hell is a shark?” Which had derailed the focus of the conversation towards ancient aquatic Terran history.

Peter’s knee-jerk reaction to any serious threat — grab Juno and escape — wasn’t going to be viable here. Even before he had found out about Peter’s side plans for the Gilded Globe and other objects, Juno wouldn’t leave his newfound crime family behind. Juno was, in fact, exquisitely bad at leaving _anyone_ behind who wasn’t Peter himself. It was an unjust thought that Peter instantly felt guilty for, a remnant of the bitter and hurt compartment of his mind that had initially framed double-crossing Juno as a poetic retaliation. That framework had, of course, lasted about five minutes into actually reuniting with the bewildered, repentant detective before Peter had realized the scale of his miscalculation.

But anyway, trying to convince Juno to steal off with him _now_ was just a good way to get stunned again.

He could leave alone, and draw the Bareda Corporation’s attention away from the Carte Blanche. Without the CureMother, he’d be choosing between death at the hands of the Venusian Mafia or acute kidney failure. Neither sounded particularly pleasant, and Peter would strongly prefer not to die at all.

And so Peter stayed, rooted in place by indecision and exhaustion and the last fragments of his internal logic. Wait for your opponent to make a move before reacting. Buddy wasn’t planning to kill him, and Peter had certainly survived imprisonment in far worse places. He’d wait them out.

* * *

Buddy showed up the next morning holding Vespa’s medical bag, which was unexpected. She was wearing a green lamé dress with a high slit up one leg. It caught the dull industrial lights of the brig and reflected back on her hair like a fiery halo. The effect was intimidating, which Peter supposed was the point.

“Good morning, Pete,” she said genially. “Vespa is currently away, but I promise that I’m a pretty well-trained substitute for this procedure.”

“I see,” Peter said casually,matching her air of calm geniality despite his circumstances. He held out his arm for Buddy to administer the shot, waiting until the needle was out of his skin to ask his follow-up question. “And where is Vespa?”

Buddy turned away to return the vial of medicine back into Vespa’s medical kit, concealing a small smile. “Oh, Vespa and Juno decided to go on a mission together,” she said airily. “To Venus.”

Any air of calm Peter was trying to project went pretty much out the window at that point. “They did _what_ ,” he spat.

Buddy hummed, putting the medical bag back on the ground and taking the seat in the single chair that lay on the other side of the barrier. “I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised,” she said. “While Juno and Vespa have had their differences in the past, they show such promise as a team unit.”

“Differences?” Peter said, still vibrating with anger and frustration. “She _stabbed_ him!”

Buddy waved her hand. “Oh, what’s a little stabbing between family members,” she said cooly. “At least she had the decency to stab him in his front.”

In the tense silence that followed, Buddy lost her sense of distracted nonchalance. “As I was saying,” she continued slowly, “Juno and Vespa both recognized that the Bareda Corporation is going to serve as a problem for us, as they’re currently tracking you and now know quite a bit about the special objects you have in your possession. They offered to solve this problem.”

“So they’re just going to . . . . attack the Venusian mafia?” Peter asked furiously. “Goodness, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Oh, I imagine you did,” Buddy said bluntly. “They would be expecting you, though. Any version of you. And they must have your DNA on file by now, which can lend itself to all kinds of very tricky surveillance and security measures.”

Peter waved this trivial detail aside impatiently. “Their security isn’t the point. It’s their size. You can’t be foolish enough to let Juno and Vespa go guns blazing into the Bareda headquarters. It’s a suicide mission!”

Buddy raised her eyebrows in a particular way that let Peter know that a stranger would have found himself admiring the sunlight shining through a new blaster wound for a similar remark. “I’m not in the habit of sending my wife on suicide missions,” she began. “Would you like me to tell you what I had them do instead?”

Peter had spent several weeks calculating myriad hypotheticals to this exact scenario, leveraging every skill and connection in his admittedly-impressive repertoire. “ _Yes_ ,” he said tightly.

She leaned back in her chair. “Juno and Vespa are, admittedly, ladies of action,” she said drily. “But I’m not. I’m a planner, Pete, and I’ve been thinking about how to rectify your situation for quite a while. You see, your identity can’t be known by very many members of the Bareda Corp. They wouldn’t want to risk a lower-level employee sharing the information with the Brahmese government to grab the bounty. There are ten, maybe fifteen members who are high-ranking enough to be dealing with your case. Juno and Vespa have their names and, more importantly, the element of surprise. They’re under the impression that Juno is still solving crimes on Mars. And, well—” Buddy’s smile grew slightly sharper and self-satisfied— “in my very broad experience, no one ever really expects Vespa.”

“Even if that works,” Peter said heatedly, “I’m still in the database under Peter Ransom. They can’t erase every record that the Bareda Corp has on me.”

“Can’t we?” Buddy asked. “We do, after all, have a very talented hacker and the galaxy’s best hacking Book at our disposal. After Juno and Vespa finish off the upper echelon of the Bareda Corp, Rita is going to direct them to gain access to their medical debt files. The Bareda Corp has been particularly aggressive in acquiring medical debt from Brahmese patients suffering from your particular ailment. All of those case files are going to mysteriously disappear. The Bareda Corp, once they recover from losing almost all of their leadership, won’t be able to trace the hack back to your file. And, of course, there’s the added bonus of helping many, many other sick people.”

“It’s a good plan,” Peter admitted, as evenly as he could through clenched teeth.

“It is,” Buddy agreed. “I imagine it would have been cathartic for you to participate in it.”

That stung, and it took all of Peter’s skill to hide how much. “I am accustomed,” he said stiffly, “to settling my own scores.”

Buddy stared him down. “As am I, darling,” she replied. “So I guess we’re both learning to be a little more flexible.”

* * *

Peter awkwardly paced in his cell for several hours and considered breaking out of the Carte Blanche to personally murder the entirety of the Venusian mafia three separate times until Vespa burst into the room, sporting a small butterfly bandage on the side of her head.

“Steel’s fine,” she said preemptively. “Kid doesn’t have a scratch on him.”

“Then _where_ _is he_?” Peter asked. It came out sounding mortifyingly petulant.

Vespa snorted. “Showering, probably. Never meet a sharpshooter who was that queasy over a little blood. I’m just here to take your cast off.”

Peter suddenly remembered, distantly, that yesterday had been the circled date in his calendar to remove the lighter leg cast that Vespa had installed him into three weeks and approximately eight centuries ago.

“Very well,” he said, extending the encased leg tentatively. “How would you like to arrange this?”

Vespa pulled out a pocket laser, clicking in on with sickly neon buzz. “I can cut it off through the bars,” she said, extending one arm. “It’s not rocket science.”

It’s the crackle of the laser rather than any actual fear of pain that caused Peter to flinch. Even now, any sound approximating live electrical currents brought up . . . . unpleasant memories. Miasma really had been a little too enamored with electrocution as a punishment.

“Relax, Ransom,” Vespa said. “If I had Buddy’s permission to kill you, I would have done it before now.”

They all still called him Ransom— well, except for Juno, if Juno would deign to talk to him. It was disconcerting, wearing Ransom’s persona after so many holes had been poked in it. Peter had never been so conscious of an alias before, hanging off of him like a partially shed skin.

Peter Ransom was dismayed but not particularly affected by his colleagues’ discovery of his planned betrayal. Peter Nureyev was a little more complicated.

The thing is, betrayal is the foundation of professional thieving. Peter had betrayed a lot of people he hated, and a good number of people he liked. It was never personal; it was about having a better hand, the better handle on a situation, and making a call that would allow you to advance in your objective. If someone pulled the rug out from under you — if they exploited your dreams and ideals and fears for their own gain— you should have been standing on a different rug. It was a lesson that sixteen-year-old Peter Nureyev learned the hard way. 

Of course, then Juno Steel had arrived with his ludicrously attractive moral outrage and thrown a spanner in everything, but Peter’s point was: _why on earth_ _was Vespa so angry_?

She was definitely angry: Peter could tell Vespa’s genuine anger from the moments where she was wearing aggression like a protective cloak. Vespa had also loudly proclaimed Peter’s guilt for weeks and hadn’t been shy about broadcasting how little she trusted him.

Peter was wise enough to wait to ask the question until Vespa was done cutting through his leg cast with a laser. “I have to say,” he said, as she cracked the two sides of the cast open like a plastic egg, “I thought you would be happier about this turn of events.”

Vespa snorted and ignored him.

“What?” Peter asked angrily.

“Steel said the same thing,” Vespa said, still focused on peeling away the plastic shell of the cast.

Any mention of Juno was bound to take Peter’s indignation out at the knees. He thought about shipwrecking his pride and asking Vespa about how he was again.

“You’re going to need to stretch this,” Vespa said. Peter’s right leg was pale and shriveled-looking, thin from weeks of disuse.

Peter moved the limb tentatively, paying close attention to where the muscles of his calf twinged with tension. “Buddy was aware of the risks when she hired me,” he said abruptly.

Vespa threw her laser cutter down on the floor, where it hit with a sizzling thump. “I’m not mad because of Buddy!” She shouted.

For a moment they looked at each other silently, both caught off guard. Vespa cocked her head, clearly having some sort of internal debate. “I’m not _just_ mad because of Buddy,” she amended gruffly.

Peter sputtered. “Oh, and since when are you riding to Juno’s defense?”

“Since a day ago,” Vespa growled, grabbing her laser cutter from the ground and stowing it roughly in her medical bag. “It’s _exhausting_.”

She stomped out of the room, leaving Peter to stare in confusion into space.

* * *

Of course, just because Juno wasn’t interested in seeing him doesn’t mean that Peter couldn’t sometimes hear him; the walls of the Carte Blanche, as Jet loved to remind him, were incredibly thin.

Rita’s voice acted more or less like a personal GPS, particularly when she was able to corral everyone together for a Crime Family Stream Night. Buddy had latched onto the idea with grim enthusiasm in their first few weeks together aboard the Carte Blanche and had enlisted Peter in helping her corral the two least enthusiastic stream viewers (Vespa and Juno) to show up and stay put. Peter had mostly accomplished this by either trapping Juno in place like an affectionate octopus or playing with his hair.

Hearing the Stream Nights from several rooms away was a different experience. Peter could just make out the hum of the dialogue and the ludicrously overblown side effects, as well as Rita and Jet’s running commentary.

“That is inaccurate,” Jet said. “The maximum speed of a Carbonite 56 is only one hundred and seventy-five miles per hour, and it does not have the structural integrity to successfully crash through the wall of that reptile enclosure.”

“ _Alligators_ ,” Rita said rapturously. “And a vat of lava! Hey Boss, can we —“

“No, Rita,” Juno replied, with the tone of someone who had fielded this question several hundred times.

“No, this one is a good plan,” Vespa chimed in over the sounds of reptile growling and tearing flesh. “I like alligators.”

Juno laughed. “Of course you do,” he said. “They’re snappy and struggle with changing directions.”

“It wasn’t a _shortcut_ , Steel, it was a totally different route!” Vespa yelled, and Rita protested something about the popcorn before the room devolved into chaos. Peter could hear the baritone boom of Jet’s laugh and Juno making some sort of jibe about zig-zagging before shouting“—hey, no fair, hair is off-limits—” and everything melded back into indistinguishable noise.

On the surface, it might have seemed like a standard Juno and Vespa conversation— Juno provoking and Vespa escalating. But they both sounded so much more . . . _relaxed_. Peter could tell when Juno was quipping to lash out and when he was quipping to tease, and Vespa’s snapping had lost its barbed defensiveness. They sounded like friends, albeit friends whose conversations still occasionally ended in a food fight.

It’s not that Peter was unhappy, per se, that Juno and Vespa are suddenly getting along. He had spent several weeks warily trying to keep the peace between them, after all. It’s one less thing that he has to worry about while incapacitated, even if they were taking extremely concerning field trips together to provoke the Venusian mafia.

Vespa suddenly trusting Juno wasn’t particularly surprising, either. Nureyev had initially needed to contend with his surprise and slight dismay when learning that the group of legendary outlaws that he had clawed his way into already trusted Juno as an adoptive child or begrudged ally. But, to be fair, Nureyev had surrendered his mostly closely-guarded secret to the surly detective after knowing him for slightly over twelve hours. Juno had that effect on most people— either they wanted to kill him on first meeting, or they wanted to kill _for_ him. Apparently, Vespa had finally moved into the latter category.

“— idolized you two as a kid,” Juno said faintly one night, somewhere from the direction of the kitchen. “Hell, I guess a lot of us did. Sometimes I think—” and then his voice faded out again, audible only for occasional snatches of “— the idea of facing down the world with a partner— “ and “— I guess what I mean to say is—”

“Do you _ever stop talking,_ ” Vespa snarled. “I liked it better when you were all sad and quiet.”

“No you didn’t,” Juno said smugly. Peter knew exactly what smile he was using now, the one where he was being a bit of a brat and knew it.

It’s just _infuriating_.

* * *

One morning Peter awoke to find that someone had lined the entire floor of the brig with Legos of different shapes and sizes. This told him two things.

The first was that his condition was getting worse if he could sleep through someone not only entering but _decorating_ his cell.

The second was that Rita and Jet were working together.

“I really don’t see the point of this,” Peter announced evenly into the empty space of the brig, where Rita would inevitably be listening on the security feeds.

He figured out the point a few moments later when he tentatively set the ball of his good foot into what he thought was a clear space and letting out an undignified squeak of surprise when what felt like several barbed knives piercing the bottom of his feet. He lept back onto the safety of the cot and inspected the bottom of his foot, which was stuck to a small plastic lego with bulbous circular protrudings and apparently devastatingly sharp edges.

Jet emerged a few hours later, running an approving eye over the tiny area of cleared space around the cot and Peter’s scowl.

“May I ask,” Peter said dangerously, “why there are children’s toys all over the floor of the brig?”

“Buddy mentioned that you seemed unimpressed with the Carte Blanche’s security measures,” Jet said with a perfectly straight face. “We were invited to supplement them as necessary.”

“How creative of you,” Peter said through gritted teeth.

“You should be glad, Mista Ransom!” a voice echoed tinnily through the speakers of the brig’s security cameras. “My first idea was to fill the floor with water and piranhas like that room in _Prison Break 4: Escape from Piranha Island_ because that’s _what you deserve_ , but Buddy said that so much still water on a spaceship would probably cause some mold problems and I got bad allergies.”

“I see,” Peter lied. “That... certainly puts things into perspective.”

“Ransom,” Jet said finally, leaning infinitesimally back against the wall and looking at Peter with something approaching curiosity for the first time, “do you know why I had a hard time trusting you when you first joined us on the Carte Blanche?”

It was a question that Peter had mulled over since his first minutes on the Carte Blanche. While a younger Peter Nureyev had idolized the justice-fueled exploits of Buddy Aurinko and Vespa Ilkay, a post-New-Kinsasha Peter had turned to the storied feats of the Jet Siquiliak, a wild bandit who didn’t bother cloaking his exploits in the mantle of political freedom-fighting. The Unnatural Disaster stole to gain riches and glory and didn’t stop to reason through whether or not he was stealing the right things from the right people. In a twisted, corrupt galaxy, Jet Siquilak had lived by the bible of self-sufficiency. It was something Peter had chosen to admire.

“No,” Peter replied. “I can guess, but I don’t.”

“You remind me of myself when I was younger,” Jet said.

This was not what Peter was expecting the other man to say. “Oh,” he said, surprised and more than a little flattered.

“That was not a compliment,” Jet added.

“Oh,” Peter echoed.

Jet strode forward to sit in the single chair facing opposite the bunk, the Legos crunching under his boots. “You have many flaws, and I do not know how to address them all,” he said plainly. “I once changed by locking my old self away, but I’ve come to realize that I need to accept who I was, just as I must be honest about why your mannerisms led me to distrust you rather than simply wishing that you were not here.”

“Well, that is . . . . . honest,” Peter said tiredly. “If it makes you feel better, you’re not likely to have to wish for much longer.”

“It does not make me feel better,” Jet replied. “Ransom, I do not doubt that you could escape the Carte Blanche if you really wanted to. I do not know if you’re choosing not to because you see us as your best chance of survival, because you have accepted your own death, or because you want to change.”

And that was indeed the question that Nureyev had been circling for the better part of his time in confinement.

“I once told Juno that he must believe that he would survive while I was surgically removing his cybernetic eye in Dr. Hanataba’s abandoned medical clinic,” Jet continued. “You should believe that we will get you the Curemother, and ask yourself what you plan to do after that.”

“I need to— I’m sorry, you were doing _what_?” Peter sputtered.

“I was surgically removing Juno’s cybernetic eye in Dr. Hanataba’s abandoned medical clinic,” Jet repeated calmly. “This is not quite the same situation. For one thing, there is no tea, or a manual of recommended steps. But I choose to believe that you also have some form of control over your fate.”

The fraction of Peter’s brain that was not reviewing every increasingly alarming word of Jet’s repeated sentence — when had Juno gotten a _cybernetic eye_?—was confronting the truth of his advice. If he lived— if the crew successfully got the CureMother and chose to give it to him— what then? Peter Ransom had wanted to be totally self-sufficient, and then had just wanted to live. Peter Nureyev’s desires had only ever brought him disaster.

* * *

Peter got worse, which was inevitable. Even with his leg out of a cast and increased mobility, his limbs got heavier, and he slept more than he ever had.

The nausea escalated as well; Peter sometimes awoke in the middle of the night, jostled out of sleep by the feeling of bile rising in his throat. The food that the crew brought him had gotten plainer,but it could only do so much.

Peter had been worried about this point, earlier: the point at which he could no longer mask the symptoms of radiation sickness. Secrecy was no longer a concern, but it was still humiliating, hunching over the toilet and pushing his sweat-slicked hair out of his face. Peter heard footsteps and the creak of the brig door behind him before someone gently gathered his hair up in one hand and braced his shoulders with the other.

“Woah, hey,” Juno said quietly.

Peter coughed hoarsely. Everything about this situation was excruciatingly embarrassing, but in the moment he didn’t care. “Juno?”

“Yep,” Juno said. “Lucky for you, I have a lot of experience being on the other side of this situation. Take deep breaths.”

Peter had spent hours preparing to defend himself to Juno, to explain the situation he was in and reassure him that nothing that happened between them was a lie. He hadn’t prepared to be vomiting most of the contents of his stomach at the time.

A second pair of footsteps rang behind him. “I got ice,” Vespa said.

Peter swayed slightly, and Juno tightened his grip on his shoulders. “Thanks,” he said. “Nureyev, you good?”

Peter wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ‘good,’but it was nice to hear Juno say his name. “Yes,” he said faintly.

Juno hauled him up and back towards his bed. They had perfected a routine, back when Peter was in a cast and almost entirely immobile. It was odd to feel nostalgic for that time.

Once Peter was collapsed on his cot, Vespa brusquely arranged his limbs in a configuration that Peter distantly recognized was supposed to keep him from choking in his sleep.

“Should we, I dunno, be watching him?” Juno whispered. “Just in case?”

Vespa sighed. “Your bleeding fucking heart, Steel. You take first watch, and I’ll get Jet to replace you.”

By morning, there was a small stack of books next to the folding chair on the other side of the brig. Peter could recognize Jet’s mechanical engineering manuals and Rita’s romance novels, which also might have been Vespa’s, though she would probably stab him for suggesting it.

The list of people who had watched Peter while he slept consisted entirely of ‘people who were planning to kill him’ and ‘occasionally: Juno.’ He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this new information.

* * *

Buddy was watching him one night when sleep was proving unusually elusive. She was dressed far more informally and thumbing through copies of what looked like security logs for the Board of Fresh Starts. At some point, she must have noticed that Peter was lying awake, staring listlessly at the metal ceiling of the brig. “Did I ever tell you how Vespa and I met?” She asked suddenly, her pen pausing over the records.

A young Peter Nureyev would have literally walked over hot coals for Buddy Aurinko and Vespa Ilkay’s origin story. “I don’t believe you have,” he said.

Buddy shifted in her seat, looking out into the distance. “Well, I had just stolen a leopard from a Saturnalian Oil Baron,” she said casually. “I had stolen most of his possessions, actually, but the leopard was the one giving me the most trouble. Leopards are incredibly valuable on the black market as elite pets, but they do also have a concerning tendency to bite you very hard. There aren’t many doctors on Saturn who will treat a wanted fugitive, and even fewer who will react well to a patient gatecrashing their office with a cranky leopard.” She smiled indulgently. “There aren’t any, actually. Vespa was furious.”

Peter stared, trying to figure out whether he was being told a completely fictional story as some sort of continued hazing ritual. “What happened next?”

Buddy sighed. “Well, I was instantly smitten, though Vespa claims that it was just delirium from the blood loss. Luckily, the leopard liked her a lot more than he liked me because there was a bit of a tangle involving the Oil Baron’s cronies and the police. Between my planning and Vespa’s skills with a scalpel, we managed to escape, but her office did sustain some collateral damage. Naturally, she was a little displeased, but I promised her half of my bounty from the heist to fix it up if she helped me escape Saturn.”

“Naturally,” Peter echoed drily. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe this story?”

Buddy laughed. “Darling, I couldn’t make it up! We had to give up the leopard in the end— I believe it lived to a ripe old age in some nature conservatory— but I convinced Vespa that life as an intergalactic thief was a lot more fun than a black market doctor. The rest is, quite literally, history.”

Peter smiled tightly. “It’s a good story.”

Buddy sighed. “It is. It doesn’t end there, of course, but it gets more complicated. That’s the trouble of being an icon. You’re supposed to live spectacularly, or die spectacularly, and for the rest of my life I don’t particularly want to do either.” 

It was the first time that Buddy had acknowledged that they had this in common: a shared legacy that could be their pride and glory or an anchor around their neck.

Buddy shifted in her chair. “You’re younger than I thought you’d be,” she added. “I always assumed that Peter Nureyev was older.”

A lot of people thought that. It was certainly more glamorous to imagine the famed freedom fighter Peter Nureyev as a confident, self-assured adult rather than a terrified teenager. It was also the first time that anyone on board the Carte Blanche had acknowledged that they knew who Peter really was.

“I was a young fool,” he said bitterly. “It seems that the moral core you talked about never did me any good after all.”

Buddy hummed noncommittally. “It was a very brave thing you did. Whatever happened to your co-conspirator? I’ve always wanted to know.”

Peter smiled thinly and looked at the ground. “I stabbed him in the back.”

If Buddy was surprised at this information, she didn’t show it. “Well,” she said wryly. “Old habits.”

* * *

Peter knew that the crew was about to head out on their revised CureMother heist when Juno appeared in the brig during what could be broadly construed as waking hours. He was wearing an odd mix of loungewear that Peter knew came from bringing almost no luggage aboard the Carte Blanche and subsequently appropriating any stray pieces of clothing left by their teammates in the mess hall. The faded crew-neck that hung loosely over one shoulder was almost certainly Jet’s, while the snug navy joggers that ended an inch above his ankles were probably Vespa’s. The whole ensemble ended up looking carelessly chic, which Peter usually would have admired, but now put his back up for reasons he didn’t feel like examining right now.

“Hey,” Juno said belligerently, as if gearing up to start a fight, before deflating slightly. “We’re going to head out first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I see,” Peter responded, leaning forward on his cot. “I’d ask about your plan, but I understand that the Captain has marked that information as ‘need-to-know,’ so I suppose I don’t . . . need to know, as it were.”

Juno didn’t answer his question, which was as good as a confirmation. “I need you to promise me that you’re going to stay here,” he said, gripping the bars of the mesh divider with paled knuckles.

Peter sighed and gestured tiredly, trying to point simultaneously to the brig and his own general condition. “I hardly have anywhere else to go.”

“I mean it, Nureyev,” Juno said intently. “Look—“ he started before breaking off.

It occurred belatedly to Peter that they were once again trying to have a conversation through the wrong side of a door.The airlock of Miasma’s vault, the door of the Hyperion Hotel, the bunks of the Carte Blanche: it was a concerning theme. It would make a beautifully tragic story; it would make a terrible relationship.

Maybe Juno was thinking the same thing in his extended pause. “We’re coming back,” he finally said. “I’m not here to say goodbye. I’m not saying the heist isn’t risky, but it’s a good plan.” 

“I’m sure it is,” Peter said. “I’ll be here when you get back, Juno.”

And really, he _was going to be_. Nureyev had every intention of staying in his cell and putting his life in the hands of Juno and Buddy and Jet and Rita and — if he _had to_ , even Vespa. He was going to trust that they could do this, the most dangerous heist in the world, without him. He was going to apologize, and submit to Vespa’s incessant threats of violence, and step on several more Legos. Peter would rather, at the end of the day, be the prodigal son of the Aurinko Crime family than strike out on his own.

An hour into the said heist, though, Dark Matters broke onto the Carte Blanche,so Nureyev had to improvise. He could make some grand gesture of trust and respect later, after all of their lives stopped being in danger.

**Author's Note:**

> . . . . can you tell that I desperately want to write a Bringing Up Baby AU about Vespa and Buddy’s first meeting. Ever since Kevin said that Buddy was based on Katherine Hepburn I have been dying for this. 
> 
> I genuinely thought this fic was going to be less sad, but the second half is much happier and funnier! I promise!


End file.
